THE MODERN CHALLENGE 185
over women voters, and all party organizations were inclined
to resist any change which might upset their constituency com-
mittees, little could be achieved. French devotion to the family
and the legal traditions of the Roman paterfamilias equally
militated against separate political power for husband and
wife.
Schemes for proportional representation were likewise fre-
quently put forward, and in 1919 one half-hearted experiment
of the kind was attempted. It was combined with the second
experiment in scrutin de liste rather than scrutin uninominal. The
larger unit of the department was made the voting area, in
which electors chose not merely between rival candidates for
their own arrondissement but instead for rival lists of candidates
drawn up by the party organizations. In 1911 a parliamentary
committee*of the Chamber had been set up to make recom-
mendations, and the change was supported by groups on the
extreme Right and extreme Left. The arguments used in its
favour were that it would drive the smaller groups into forming
party organizations, that it would tend to emphasize issues of
general national policy as against local and sectional interests
and pressures, and would obviate the bother and possible cor-
ruption of a second ballot. It was opposed on the grounds that
it would unduly strengthen the grip of party caucus over the
candidate, and by consolidating groups would make a govern-
mental, majority still more difficult to attain and to keep. The
following year Poincare adopted a draft law, based on the
scheme of transferable votes suggested by the mathematician-
politician, Painlev6 The Opposition, headed by Jaures, de-
feated the proposal in the Chamber by 497 votes against 91.
The attempted compromise was so complicated that the scheme
was shelved when the Senate voted against it.
In 1919 a very restricted version of the scheme was put into
practice, whereby proportional representation only began to
apply at the second ballot, that is when there was no clear
party majority in a department on the first ballot. Where there
was, that party got all the seats. The result was to give a great
advantage to electoral discipline—which happened at the time
to be much stronger on the Right than on the Left. The fissure